Under construction for Ars Electronica Festival 2020
An idea is suspended in the air: the world will be a different place after the viral crisis. But before we get to that after, we still have to get there. We are in the in-between. The uncertainty of the in-between is the moment of mutation. In the Chilean case, this experience overlaps with an unprecedented social and political unrest: the mutation of the constitutional regime that has sustained the country since the 1973 coup d’état. This uncertain in-between where local political transformation is overlapped with the global instability, is the core of the Mutations a proposal developed at Universidad Austral de Chile.
The Program proposal includes four activities that will present the city’s ecosystem and the southern macro-zone of Chile, in relation with historical, cultural, ecological and visual mutations. Artistic proposal includes eight works which address mutation as an internal condition of art: the place of theater in a world that is crumbling, landscapes of inorganic objects, mutations of the domestic space in confinement, the boundary between nature and economy, the oral memory of women in confinement, the urban landscape and urban bodies crushed by the violence of the political revolt, the spectral sound of social claims in relation to their suspension due to the pandemic, and the archeology of the technological mutation in Chile. Seismographs of the in-between, these works are unfinished processes determined by the mutation.
Located in an incomparable natural and cultural ecosystem in the city of Valdivia, the Universidad Austral de Chile (UACh) is among the top five universities nationwide and the first regional university in the South of Chile. UACh mission is to contribute to the spiritual and material progress of the society through the resources of scientific and humanistic knowledge, technological progress and artistic creation. Within their organic, the Artistic Creation Department of the Vice-Chancellorship of Research, Development & Arts, is in charge to generate regulations and policies for artistic creation and research in the University and support the artistic and professional careers development of their academics. The Faculty of Architecture and Arts, also as part of UACh, it assumes the task of signifying the differentiated set of arts and architecture under a unifying and contemporary paradigm, with the desire to be an effective contribution for society, culture, arts and people in the South.
